Fonts

I didn't need another reason to hate Internet Explorer but I found one. It turns out that if you use certain fonts at certain sizes in IE then the decenders get cut off. Ok, lets break that down.

Decenders

A decender is the part of a letter (typically a lowercase letter) that drops down below the baseline. Here are the usual suspects: g,j,p,q,y. On occasion you may come across a font that include some other decenders but they are rare, and they are certainly not web safe fonts.

During a recent project the bulk of the design work was outsourced and the designs that came back were laden with Arial Black headers. After the initial alarm bells subsuded I began to ask myself if the time had finally come when websites could let loose and go crazy—had the day arrived when the number of fonts choices crept passed seven? So I started looking…